


HAKKŌ.

by Blattodea



Category: Underworld Capital Incident (Video Game)
Genre: Animal Death, Blood and Gore, Cannibalism, Gen, M/M, Starvation, i dont know else to tag this honestly wtf
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-16
Updated: 2018-08-16
Packaged: 2019-06-28 03:58:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,193
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15699696
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Blattodea/pseuds/Blattodea
Summary: 薄幸 (hakkō)– Star-crossed; ill-fated; misfortuneThe Great Tenmei famine lasted for six years. Between 1782 and 1788, over 100,000 people starved to death.





	1. tabitudo.

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written around Halloween last year. Art drawn by [Stan](https://twitter.com/sarabaototoi).

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 『 _tabitudo_ 』(f) n.
> 
> —— wasting away

The cold is almost unbearable, permeating deep into his core, leaving hardly any feeling in his extremities. Hasegawa lets out a deep groan, shifting under the heavy sheets as he first stirs. Light filters through the dirty windows, but the snow is thick, reducing the outside world to blurry, indistinguishable masses. He has no desire to move, only to continue sleeping, but he's scared to die, scared to rot here, always scared because the shadow of death is always there.

_He's hungry._

A week ago, Hasegawa butchered the cat. It, too, was starving. There was nothing he could do but put it out of its emaciated misery. Three days ago, he began to eat it. There was little left to consume, its muscle and organs almost entirely deteriorated, but it was still something.

There is nothing left but bones now.

_He's hungry._

"...Tanaka." His voice is hardly more than a whisper, and it is so tiring to even speak. He gets no response, and for a moment he's afraid the other has died, gone and died and left him here all alone.

"Tanaka."

Finally, Tanaka coughs, once, twice, three times, before moaning, so quietly it sounds like he's part of the wind. His breath is shallow, and weak, and Hasegawa knows very well that time has all but run out for him.

_He's hungry._

Tanaka gave up weeks ago, won't eat, only sleeps for what feels like days. When he's awake, he's barely coherent. Slowly, he's withering away, and Hasegawa can only watch.

_He's hungry._

Tanaka's eyelids flutter, but his eyes are glassy. He is clinging to the last shreds of his life as his body begins to shut down. The cold and the hunger have claimed him as their own. 

_He's hungry._

Tanaka won't eat. Tanaka is letting himself waste away.

_He's hungry._

Something in Hasegawa snaps, one last spider's thread, and as he does the unthinkable, he stops thinking.

Tanaka's skin is cold to the touch, and Hasegawa's hands shake not with nervousness, but with exhaustion, as he rolls his friend onto his back, rips the thick, ratty covers off. His friend won't, or maybe can't, look up at him. His mouth hangs open, chest barely rising and falling as he breathes. He is so cold.

His body is working on its own as he kneels, lifts up Tanaka's shirt, leans down, sinks his teeth into leathery flesh. Tanaka does nothing more than whine, though his fingers twitch for the first time in days. It has been so long since he's moved.

Hasegawa eats ravenously, rips out the shrunken and darkened stomach, laps up the blood that slowly, weakly, pulses outwards into his abdominal cavity. His muscles do not twitch, and Tanaka's fingers have stopped moving as well.

As emaciated as he is, his own stomach is still small. Eating much more is impossible. The cold will preserve him, but not for long.

Tanaka's heart is still struggling in vain to pump, but he is no longer moving. A small spot stains his pants; in some hardly-aware fear response, he must have soiled himself... but no food means no waste. Every resource had been depleted so long ago.

He lays, bleeding out on the bed, staring into nothing, and Hasegawa knows he is dead. _Dead, dead, dead, dead as a doornail, and he's the one that killed him._

Because Tanaka won't eat, but Hasegawa will.


	2. boketto.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 『 _boketto_ 』v.
> 
> —— gazing or staring vacantly and thoughtlessly into the distance

Hasegawa has lost track of the time. Tanaka's abdomen has been reduced to visceral shambles, organs shredded and torn, his intestines hanging limply off the edge of the crimson bed. The smell of bile has faded, replaced with the thick scent of decay. The quiet is haunting, and he can hear nothing more than the sleet outside and the thump-thump——thump of his heartbeat, quick and loud in his ears.

_He's tired._

His limbs feel like lead, tingling unpleasantly as he takes a ragged breath. He feels like he can do nothing but stare at the corpse, stare at the dried blood staining his hands, staining the sheets, staining his clothes.

_He's tired._

He forces himself to roll over, and the room spins and when he finally opens his eyes he's on the floor, legs crumpled awkwardly beneath him. He wants to run far, far away from here, but he lacks the strength to stand. He wants to run far from the starvation and from the flooding and the blizzards and far from the corpses, too. For the briefest of moments, he opens his mouth to tell his companion of this idea.

_His companion, his beloved._

He sits up, and his head spins again, and he remembers Tanaka is dead again. He remembers the feeling of warm, slimy viscera on his tongue, in his throat, the heavy weight of having a full stomach for the first time in weeks: His stomach, aching horribly, pain trailing up into his back and his shoulders and his chest like thick tendrils.

Tanaka is haunting him. He's haunting him because he killed him and he ate him and now he has to die too because he is absolutely horrible, but he was so hungry and he was going to die anyways and **meat is meat isn't it**?

_He's so tired._

His arms shake as he lifts himself up, his body even weaker now than it had been when he was starving. Why did this happen? What had they done to deserve this?

Hasegawa and Tanaka had grown up in separate villages, at least for a few years. The daimyō of Tanaka's village had overtaken Hasegawa's when they were children, and with the two communities connected, they could now travel back and forth freely.

Hasegawa's family trade was that of the fisherman, and Tanaka's, the farmer. With Tanaka's mother too sickly and his father too busy working to travel, every week Hasegawa would sit in the back of the cart with baskets of fish, listening to the oxen's hooves against the dirt roads as they travelled across the creek, through the makeshift path that split the woods in two.

They would sit in the grass near the rice fields while their parents traded, watching the crops sway in the breeze, talking for hours. This was how they grew up: Together. The other children of their villages were just fine, of course, but Tanaka and Hasegawa held a deep bond unlike any other they knew of.

They were happy.

Even as they grew older, they stayed close. Stray touches and intimate moments, secrets kept between just the two of them because they were sure no one else in Japan could ever have a bond as close as theirs. Even as Tanaka inherited his mother's own exhaustion, and even as drought and cold overtook the fields and the rivers, they stayed close.

Tanaka's mother went first, lost to illness and hunger. One by one, the people around them dwindled, nature's wrath unfurling, a thick blanket of sleet and death. Their families had not been one of the lucky ones, and in the end, it had been just the two of them, huddled in Hasegawa's home, together.

They died as they had lived.

_Together._


End file.
